Twitter Made Him Do It

CommentsA fan named Dylan Masone (wearing a Robinson Cano jersey) decided to run onto the field after receiving 1,000 retweets for his own dare. (USA TODAY Sports)

Last night's All-Star Game was entertaining enough and gave us the Mariano Rivera Moment we were all hoping for, but I hope you'll forgive me when I say that the main thing I'm going to remember is the guy who live-tweeted the fact that he was going to run on the field while his girlfriend egged him on and his mother begged him not to.

I've written before that we, as a collective, secretly love it when fans run on the field, tsk-tsking publically but deep down getting a cathartic kick out of someone getting away with something. (Particularly when there's so often a violent tackle at the end of it.) But last night -- which the people watching at home never got to see, as usual -- was something different. Last night we got to watch the thought process develop and morph into action.

Well: "Thought process." Using a phrase like that to describe what Dylan Masone did last night probably requires quotes.

SB Nation has the full, glorious transcript -- and it really can only be described as a transcript -- of what went down, but I'll summarize in case sifting through embedded Tweets and Getty Images photos wears you out somehow.

Dylan Masone (@masonedylan) is a recent high school graduate -- he spent a good chunk of his Twitter last week berating people for not coming to his graduation party -- who sent out an Instagram photo at 5:41 of himself wearing a Robinson Cano jersey. This was a normal tweet that received only two retweets. Two hours later, Masone got bored and joked that if this tweet received 1,000 RTs, he would run on the field. One thousand retweets is a lot fewer retweets than you (or Masone, apparently) realize: I once received more than 5,000 for a sort of obvious joke tweet I sent out when the lights went out at the Superdome during the Super Bowl this year. You get there faster than you think.

Masone got there in about an hour and a half. And here's where the interesting thing happens: He then felt like he had to do it. As if he were bound by law, as if this were now out of his control. His tweets after he hit the 1,000 retweets mark have a sort of amused panic about them: "lmao this is gonna be terrible" "i hate all of you" "alright.. i guess have no choice.. gonna try to get out by left field." And then it got real: Then his mom found out. (Teenagers: Your parents are reading your Twitter. Whatever possibly made you think otherwise?) Then his girlfriend, with the same sort of Twitter anarchism as her beau, did as well.

At this point, Masone has the classic teenager boy conundrum. Your mother is your mother: She tells you what to do, and you usually obey, if just because you want your laundry done and the occasional sandwich. And your girlfriend is your girlfriend: She's pretty much the representation of the rather dramatic changes foisted upon you and your body over the last four years, and thus you'd follow her into Hell. So when she tweets things like "Dylan has no guts what's so ever, he wonntt" and "Dylan won't do this I know him to well" and "Ill let you marry me if you do this @MasoneDylan", well … at that point … in retrospect it's good the popular Tweet wasn't "1000 RT's and ill douse myself in gasoline and engulf my whole section in flames #ASG#CitiField" because he would have absolutely done that too. At that point, even with his mother now pleading with him to stop, he had to go through with it.

As SB Nation pointed out, his girlfriend kept tweeting after the game, and all told, she was proud of him. Which, no matter what happened to him last night and this morning, no matter how much trouble he's in with his mom, no matter whether or not he's permanently banned from Citi Field now (and he surely is) … I have no doubt that in his mind, it was completely worth it.

(Side note: It's going to be hilarious, and sad, in 25 years, when Masone is just a normal middle aged white dude and has to explain to his son why he can't take him to a Mets game. "Well, son, there was once this thing called Twitter …")

People my age and older are always talking about how lucky they feel that technology like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram didn't exist when we were in high school. That we did so many embarrassing and idiotic things on such a regular basis that inevitably one or two of them would be humiliating us well into adulthood. This is true. But last night was the first time I realized that many times the technology would actually cause us to do embarrassing and idiotic things. Teenagers are stupid, and technology makes them dumber. Good Lord. I might have been dead had it all been around in the early '90s.

I will never act as if my generation had it tougher than today's teenagers. We absolutely did not. Godspeed, kids. You're all doomed.